Google Apps for Education

Hingham has partnered with Google’s free Google Apps service for our students and staff. All staff as well as secondary-level students have Google Apps accounts with usernames and passwords pre-configured for use. If you wish to take advantage of this optional service, login to our Google portal via the following URL:

Your username is formatted as an email address (though students are not presently provided mail services through the District’s Google Apps portal). It is the same as your login to the school network, [plus the domain suffix “@hinghamschools.org” (no quotes), e.g. [email protected]].
**Please contact your building’s tech specialist if you do not know the default password for initial setup. ** When you first connect, you will be asked to accept the Google terms of service, fill out a CAPTCHA challenge, and change your default password. Google requires that you change that initial password to one of at least 8 characters and that it includes at least 1 number. This is only temporary; the instructions below will tell you how synchronize your password on the school network with Google Apps.

The Google Apps Password Sync service does not automatically sync your existing Active Directory passwords to Google Apps; it only syncs password changes. If for convenience you wish to use the same password for your Google Apps account as for your school network account, you would need to ‘change’ your password on the school network .:

– Login to a Windows-based school computer as per normal

– Press Control+Alt+Delete, and then the ‘Change Password’ button

– Input your current password in the ‘old password’ field

– Enter your desired password in the ‘new password’ field

[You can enter the same password in ‘new password’ as ‘old password’ to keep your existing password but to force a sync of that password to the Google Apps system.]

That change would then be propagated to the Google system immediately and at that point your credentials on Google Apps are the same as on the school network.

What services does Google Apps provide?

Google Apps for Education provides a plethora of useful services. Perhaps most notable among them is the Google Drive and Docs feature. Using Google Drive allows you to keep up to 5 GB worth of documents in the cloud for easy accessibility – from home, school, or any Internet-connected computer. This is more reliable (and convenient) than emailing copies of files to yourself or remembering to pack a USB drive to copy files back and forth. Google also offers shared calendaring, the ability to create websites through Google Sites, and much more. Google lists the benefits here: